Real-life Indoor MIMO Performance with Ultra-compact LTE Nodes

With the ever increasing demand for mobile broadband service with very high bitrates to indoor users, there is large industry traction around different types of In Building Solutions (IBS) for Long Term Evolution (LTE).

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) is a key feature in LTE enabling significantly improved user bitrates, and the indoor channel characteristics are also expected to be in favor for MIMO performance. Despite this, due to deployment constraints and design constraints on the IBS antenna design and size, many IBS deployments of today do not support MIMO. As the market evolves, this is finally changing.

This paper describes the results and conclusions from real-life measurements of 2x2 MIMO performance, done with small-size radio equipment, a commercial smartphone and a low-power radio head, both with a size of approximately a wavelength.